RUTHFULLY YOURS

As his speech ended, and before he could be whisked from the room, I ignored his bodyguards and rushed the podium. I approached the small and unlikely man and silently held out the book and pen. He beamed with a smile. Authors quietly rejoice whenever they are asked to sign their own works — even this giant whose words steered the events of world history.

The well-worn paperback was Open Secrets, a collection of essays by the Czech poet President Vaclav Havel. It was 1998 and President Havel was visiting the United States. I had been tipped off that he’d be speaking to an audience in the bowels of Congress, so I grabbed my copy of his book and set off.

I’ve collected signed books of moonwalkers and rock stars, politicians and new-media pioneers, but I treasure my signed copy of Open Secrets above all. Under his signature, he drew a simple and charming heart.

Lawmakers are demanding to know what the Environmental Protection Agency is doing about the environmental contamination it caused while “investigating” the Gold King Mine in southwest Colorado.

According to the EPA, while an agency cleanup crew was “excavating loose material that had collapsed into the cave entry, pressurized water began leaking above the mine tunnel, spilling about three million gallons of water stored behind the collapsed material into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River.”

The path of the toxic water, laced with arsenic, lead, copper and cadmium, is affecting Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Southern Ute Tribe and Navajo Nation.

“EPA is taking the lead on efforts to contain the leak and flow from the mine is now controlled. EPA has also deployed federal On-Scene Coordinators and other technicians in Colorado, New Mexico and Navajo Nation to assist with preparations and first response activities in these jurisdictions. EPA is sharing information as quickly as possible with the community as experts work to analyze any effects the spill may have on drinking water and public health,” the agency said on a website page pulled together with news on the spill and a link to a damage claim form.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said his Environment and Public Works Committee is closely monitoring the spill and the EPA’s response.

The inspector general for the intelligence community confirmed in a memo today that there was classified information in the emails stored on Hillary Clinton’s private server.

“My office received multiple Congressional requests for copies of Former Secretary Clinton’s emails containing classified Intelligence Community (IC) information,” wrote Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III. “These emails, attached hereto, have been properly marked by IC classification officials and include information classified up to ‘TOP SECRET // SI/TK // NORFORN.”

SI/TK stands for special intelligence/talent keyhole, covering signals or imagery intelligence work. NORFORN means it can’t be viewed by foreign citizens.

“IC classification officials reviewed two additional emails and judged that they contained classified State Department information when originated,” McCullough continued. “These officials referred the emails to State Department classification officials on 7 August 2015 for final determination on current classification. We will provide these documents once they have been properly marked by State Department.”

The truth is that I’ve started to really hate “climate change” stories.

The problem is that both side have made it into an item of faith. On the AGW side, the “Apostle’s Creed” is that climate change is an existential crisis, that all unpleasant weather events — and an amazing number of other things — are caused by climate change, that current changes in temperature are unprecedented, that human-driven causes are the principle reason for temperature increases, and that any measures to ameliorate climate change are justified, no matter the cost or impact. What’s more, any further discussion is pointless, as seen in the the recent editorial by the editor of Science magazine (“The beyond two-degree inferno [1]“):

see:http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2015/08/08/the-suicide-of-the-liberal-arts-by-john-agresto/
The Suicide of the Liberal Arts By John Agresto
John Agresto’s Aug. 7 essay “The Suicide of the Liberal Arts” is one of the more eloquent of the elegies for high culture that appear from time to time in the quality press. A former president of St. John’s College (Santa Fe), perhaps the best undergraduate Great Books program around, Agresto wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

When properly conceived and taught, the liberal arts do not by themselves make us “better people” or (God knows) more “human.” They don’t exist to make us more “liberal,” at least in the contemporary political sense. But the liberal arts can do something no less wonderful: They can open our eyes.

They show us how to look at the world and the works of civilization in serious and important and even delightful ways. They hold out the possibility that we will know better the truth about many of the most important things. They are the vehicle that carries the amazing things that mankind has made — and the memory of the horrors that mankind has perpetrated — from one age to the next. They teach us how to marvel.

Western culture has become inaccessible to the general public because we have lost the ability to see the world through the eyes of those who created it. A generation ago, the literary critic Harold Bloom complained in The Western Canon that it no longer was possible to teach English literature to undergraduates because they lacked the cultural references to make sense of it: imagine reading Moby Dick without knowing who Ishmael and Ahab were in the Bible, or Joyce’s Ulysses without knowing that someone named Homer had written an epic about a certain Odysseus. (Outside the English realm, Bloom is guilty of the same sort of ignorance, but that is a different matter).

Convicted in Ponzi scheme, Norman Hsu speaks in first prison interview about politics; denies he broke campaign-finance laws

Norman Hsu was in the middle of the action in national politics eight years ago, as a top fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats.These days, he is holed up in a federal penitentiary here on charges of operating a Ponzi scheme and breaking campaign finance laws, and the action is anything but heated.

Recently, an inmate asked him how to make $1 million “legitimately, in a year.” Mr. Hsu advised him: “Win the lottery.” When a guard approached him to ask a question, Mr. Hsu stopped him: “I said, ‘I know what you’re going to ask: Who’s going to be the next president?’”

The government said Mr. Hsu stole between $50 million and $100 million from individuals by claiming he was making short-term loans to retail companies—and then pressured the investors to make political contributions.

Bernie Sanders drew a crowd of 27,500 in Los Angeles on Monday. In the age of Obama, a liberal with a statist agenda fits right in.

People who follow politics probably know that Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, is a socialist. Whether they give a fig is a separate matter, which may tell you something about today’s Democrats.

Mr. Sanders is currently drawing the largest crowds of any candidate in either party. On Monday, he drew a crowd his campaign estimated at 27,500 to the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, including those in an overflow area outside, watching on giant video screens. Over the weekend, 28,000 people turned out to see him in Portland, Ore., and a campaign stop in Seattle pulled 15,000. The conventional wisdom is that Mr. Sanders’s bid is destined to fail. His progressive base is too white and too small for a party that places a premium on “diversity,” and the Democratic establishment has already settled on Mrs. Clinton.

A court says Lafe Solomon should not have had the job.

One of President Obama’s legacies will be his abuse of executive authority, and his hits keep coming. On Friday a federal appeals court struck down a ruling of the National Labor Relations Board because, incredibly, its acting general counsel was in the job illegally.

The scofflaw was Lafe Solomon, whom readers may recall for his legal complaints against the likes of Boeing for wanting to build planes in right-to-work South Carolina instead of union-dominated Washington. It turns out Mr. Solomon was the one violating the law.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a 2014 NLRB ruling against an Arizona ambulance company, SW General. The panel found that Messrs. Solomon and Obama had violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which generally holds that a person cannot serve as an “acting” officer of an agency while also nominated for the post.

Who you gonna call when the green police unleash a toxic river?

‘Ghostbusters” has been playing again on cable, so we are reminded that the villain of that movie classic was a bully from the Environmental Protection Agency. He broke the ghost-containment grid and all hell broke loose. So who you gonna call today when the E-men dump three million gallons of toxic slurry down the rivers of the West?

Last week an EPA hazmat team hoped to inspect an abandoned Gold Rush-era mine near Durango, Colorado, and the backhoe digging out the collapsed cave entrance breached a retaining wall. The blowout spilled the contaminated sludge that had accumulated for nearly a century in the mine’s tunnels into a creek that is a tributary of the Animas River, flowing at a rate of 740 gallons a minute.

The long-term consequences of allowing Choudary to be free constitute a terrible mistake: the main impact of Choudary on the wider public has been colossally to exacerbate suspicions of Muslims as a whole.

Broadcasters have for years introduced him as a “sheikh” or a “cleric,” without often casting doubt on his qualifications to such titles, or noting the comparative paucity of his following.

It is perfectly possible that Anjem Choudary will slip between the UK’s terrorism laws once again. Or perhaps now it is he that has slipped up, and the most visible chink in the UK’s counter-extremism policy has finally resolved itself.

If there was a single flaw in the British Prime Minister’s recent speech on countering extremism in the UK, it might be encapsulated in the name “Anjem Choudary.” His speech went into terrific detail on the significance of tacking radicalism through the education system, the Charity Commission, the broadcasting license authority and numerous other means. But it failed the Choudary test.